Politicians and energy policy

1) Free setdown thermostat which you can control remotely too. 2) $25 on top of that.

3) It will cut your power bills (but only at the nominal rate, AFAIK).

I might consider it it returned more than the nominal rate and the hours of peak demand were when I wasn't usually home. Otherwise, I don't see the advantage, and it's a bit creepy.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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$25 worth.

Ok, $50.

Seems like they're looking for the incredibly cheap.

That's how I see it. No thanks. I have $50 of my own.

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Keith

I have never heard anyone from a power company describe it as "turning down" the AC. They never let on that the temperature of your house will rise and you will not be as comfortable as you would like. In reality, the power company effectively will have control over your thermostat since the thermostat will be asking for AC all the time and the power company will be determining how long your unit will run, not your thermostat. Anything else won't cut the peak load.

The peak load is not a few minutes or even an hour. The kind of peak loading that will prevent the construction of new power plants will require peak load management for 4 to 8 hours a day on the worst days.

Personally, I think this is a technology that has limited practical utility. It would be far better to promote methods of conservation. That has actually worked in CA. I have heard that conservation has allowed them to put off the construction of several nuclear plants. Instead of fighting them in the courts, conservation was promoted to a point that the nukes were no longer needed. Of course, that was 10 years ago and the population has grown considerably, so other solutions are now needed. Utilities conning people into thinking that letting them control your thermostat won't make there homes uncomfortable is not my idea of an energy solution.

This thread started with the idea that if hybrids were much more common, their batteries could be used to *practically* level the load on the electric grid. What is wrong with that idea?

Actually, I am not so sure we have any say in the matter. When I was a kid, 1984 was still in the future and the book was still somewhat futuristic. I remember that the "third" country of Oceana was basically where the "Pacific Rim" is now. So Orwell had some degree of vision in his writing. The cell phones most of us carry (even I got one the other day) can provide info on our whereabouts at all times (do they ever "really" turn off???) and many of our actions can be tracked in real time via our use of credit cards.

So it may well be inevitable that Big Brother will be in control of our thermostats. I actually had this once. I was in an apartment that had been chopped out of a fairly large residence. I was never able to get much heat by adjusting the thermostat. Turns out it was just a wall decoration and the only thermostat was in their part of the house. It was not a good feeling to have no control over my comfort.

The "nominal" rate thing is red herring. Just like the water company that I dealt with, if they lower your rates for installing their thermostat, they will only have to raise rates for everyone. Then when ultimately everyone has these units installed mandatoraly, everyone's will be paying just as much as before.

But if this eliminates need to build a power plant, then the ratepayers won't have to pay for that.

Regulatory agencies largely guarantee utilities a certain amount of net profit and rate of return on their stocks. If utilities don't have to spend as much on fuel and plant building, the ratepayers will pay less. Maybe more per KWH but still less.

However, I do find it less creepy to conserve energy more manually than described here.

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

Yes, that will keep rates from going higher, but it won't reduce them. In fact, rates may still go up since maintenance costs increase as plants get older... nothing lasts forever. So you pay for new stuff or you pay to maintain old stuff.

That is true for *regulated* utilities. The movement is to de- regulate electric utilities. Also, the profit set by rate commissions is often governed as ROI which means the more they invest in capital, the more profit they can take. Have you seen many utilities that are under capitalized? Just the opposite, they often are very *over* capitalized. Some of the electric company trucks I see are way bigger than they need to be. If the cable companies provided electricity, they would do all the basic service from a mini-van :^)

In the end, you can't say anything about what consumers will pay because electricity is not a competitive industry... even when de- regulated.

I prefer to find more efficient ways of *using* energy. That is something that I am going to look into over the next years. I have reached a point in my career that I can decide the direction I want to go and energy seems like an interesting field.

Rick

If demand is allowed to increase proportionately with population growth, then the ratepayers have to pay both for new plants and maintenance of the aging ones.

If actually effectively deregulated, then the ratepayers would only pay necessary costs and a fair profit. Again, avoiding need to build new plants by keeping demand in check will save the ratepayers money.

That makes a case for utilities taking in less money if need for new plants is reduced.

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

Where can you get an IP thermostat for anywhere near that cheap? It might be good for the cottage, if the cottage had broadband ethernet.

But they're a bit pricey at the moment:

Or the smug pale-green-hybrid-driving crowd.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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"it\'s the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

How about this one?

John

sitting under a tree, stealing wi-fi, in the village of Dryden, New York.

door and

it up

sweat. If you

when it's

in

same power

right now.

and gives

on and

load

The good of the power company isn't something I consider a priority. Making a more uniform load means that the "peaker" plants don't have to be run. The "peakers" use hydrocarbons and polute the most. It is a very good thing not to run them. The average demand is usually handled by plants that are environmentally better and less costly. "better" and "less" really mean "less bad" not "good".

We need a way to store power. A hot water tank is fairly good but not great. If more people drove electric cars, charging the batteries in the cars would be a good way to store the energy. Batteries are a good way to store energy when you look at them from one cycle to the next. They are bad from the point of vies of their high cost.

[....]

That may be a "if a sled had wheels it would be a wagon" argument. To be really deregulated, the system would have to be broken up into many small parts and kept broken up. This makes coordination of the operation hard to do. If one entity controls a significant fraction of the whole market, it isn't really deregulated. A monopoly (or near monopoly) really should be thought of as just another regulator. They would be just a non-governmental regulator. They would still be able to set prices for their part of the system.

On May 26, 8:41 pm, rickman wrote: [...]

So you would have been happier if you hadn't found out. :)

If energy prices rise to the point where you have to choose between eating and being warm, you will have the same feeling only perhaps worse. The choice between two bad options is a very poor sort of choice. For many, letting the power company shut off the air conditioning may be a very good option because it will allow them to remain reasonably comfortable and still eat.

snip

This is one way to store it

martin

Oh, well, when gasoline hits mayb $50, $100/gal, people will drive less, thereby palliating the "global warming" problem, right? >:->

OOps - "climate change" - they really don't know if we're all going to freeze to death or cook, but as long as we all pay obeisance (and our money) to prince Al, he'll make it all better.

Cheers! Rich

IP? The issue was a set-back thermostat (I'm not the one who wants to set it remotely). I don't think I like the idea of an IP thermostat.

--
Keith

It seems that prices in much of the rest of the world are $6-$9/gallon, and that's about where ours will start to stabilize. Hopefully that will reduce the waste of energy by many of the people who commute long distances in stop and go traffic in their SUVs. But it will probably be more as a result of their jobs being eliminated as energy costs drive everything else up.

Here is an interesting link that shows who is making the most from higher fuel prices:

If these figures can be believed, there is really very little profit being made by US distributors, and the profits of refineries has dropped in the last year or so, but the biggest cost by far is the price of crude oil. And that money goes pretty much directly to the King of Saudi Arabia.

Still, this does not explain the much higher cost of motor fuel in Europe. It seems to be from taxes, and they are levied as a percentage of price as well as per unit quantity. I found this in a post:

...here the prices in Germany:

benzin 1 liter à 1,50 Euro (tax 65,45 ?cent/Liter + VAT 19%) diesel 1 liter à 1,50 Euro (tax 47,04 ?cent/Liter + VAT 19%)

It was about the same in Italy.

Paul

What's really sad is when some idiot pries one of those expensive plexiglas shields off a dummy thermostat, damaging the wall and shield in the process then thinks the room is actually warmer.

At one time my mother was always complaining that she was cold, and I convinced her that it was all in her mind. I had just got out of the service after a year in Alaska where it was below -20 for most of the year. After a couple weeks I never saw her shivering, or heard her complain, yet the thermostat hadn't moved. And no, she wasn't old enough to be having hot flashes.

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Time of use electric meters are standard technology. Just 'cause you don't have one does not mean that they do not exist.